 Welcome, everybody, to the official launch of the FAO eLearning Academy. I'll start by introducing myself. I'm Christina Petraki and I head the FAO eLearning Academy. Today we have a very dynamic and interesting agenda for all of you. So we have the pleasure and the honor to have with us first for the opening remarks the Deputy Director General of FAO, Mrs. Beth Bechdel. Then we will have the introductory remarks of Mrs. Vila Real, Marcella Vila Real, who is the Director of the Partnerships Division. I will then prepare, deliver a brief presentation on the FAO eLearning Academy, the pedagogical models, the innovative learning solutions that we are proposing. And then I would like to give the floor to our partners for them to share with us their testimonials and their experiences in working with us on how, what impact they have managed to reach thanks to the FAO eLearning Academy courses. So the idea is really to give the floor to our partners, to hear from them what has been their experience. I will then try to answer a few of the questions that you will be asking us during the event. And Mrs. Don Jean Fang, who is the head of the capacity development and academia unit of FAO will be delivering the concluding remarks. So without further ado, I would like to give the floor to Mrs. Beth Bechdel, the Deputy Director of FAO. Mrs. Bechdel, the floor is yours. You have five to 10 minutes. Thank you so much, Christina. And to everybody who has been a part of this very incredible effort and initiative. And I want to congratulate you and so many of our colleagues for what is a very special occasion today. So welcome everyone to the official launch of the FAO multilingual eLearning Academy. I'd like to welcome the speakers also from FAO and our partner institutions, the Union Unimed Future Food Institute in Denome, that will be sharing with us more about their experiences as you heard. As you are all aware, capacity development is at the heart of FAO's mandates, our strategic framework and our interventions worldwide. Our members lead and manage their own development processes while FAO supports them in this endeavor by strengthening their capacities to achieve their goals in food security, nutrition and sustainable agriculture development, all with an eye towards the implementation of the Agenda 2030 for sustainable development. One of FAO's current and most pressing priorities is to support members to anticipate and mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic's impacts on sustainability and on food security and protecting livelihoods. This makes the launch of the FAO multilingual eLearning Academy that seeks to promote universal transfer competencies through innovative learning solutions and pedagogical models more relevant today than ever. Today, together, we are launching the eLearning Academy that is now available in these six UN official languages in English, French, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish and Russian to ensure worldwide participation and engagement. The eLearning Academy supports members through capacity development interventions and over 350 multilingual eLearning courses offered free of charge as a global public good. We are also extremely pleased to announce that for the first time ever in its history, FAO has an academy that is the official certifying body of FAO through the digital badges certification system that enables the progression of talents within the organization and also increases employment opportunities. This is already an achievement on its own. Sustainability is one of the world's greatest goals and really the only way forward for all of us. For this purpose, we will need competent professionals able and capable to take the appropriate decisions to formulate targeted and sustainable policies and strategies to think creatively and to adopt innovative green methodologies and technologies. In other words, we can only achieve sustainability through the development of capacities and the transfer of skills and competencies. In this regard, the FAO eLearning Academy is a true pride for our organization and a trendsetter worldwide in instructional design and innovative educational models that ultimately aim to support members and enable them to face the global challenges all of humanity is facing. The eLearning Academy is the result of a collaborative effort. It wasn't done and put together just by colleagues here at FAO. There is clear joint success today that needs to be celebrated. Many partners have contributed actively and also benefited from the wealth of FAO eLearning courses. Other UN agencies that have participated and been supported throughout include UNHCR, UNITAR, UNDP. Also, we have collaborated closely with our colleagues at WFP, EFAT, ITC, ILO. We've also collaborated with the European Union, the International Federation of the Red Cross, various NGOs, CSOs, as well as regional development agencies such as ECOWAS, CILS, CLNESA, NAPA, and HAZANAN. All are adopting the FAO eLearning Academy approaches, quality criteria, and the instructor models that are part of it. And they are integrating the eLearning courses as part of their own capacity development efforts worldwide. I am so very pleased to be able to participate in this launch and to learn more as I take on my new role here at FAO about the eLearning Academy and all of the benefits that it provides to people all over the world. Christina and colleagues, I thank you and your colleagues for your contributions, your hard work, your participation, and the support that you have been able to generate. I am certain that with all of this activity, all of the success, and all of this coming together, even here today on this very Zoom call, that we can make the FAO eLearning Academy an even greater success worldwide in the future. Now, I'd like to give the floor to Marcella Villa-Rael, Director of our Partnerships Division, who will share more about the role of the Academy in the implementation of our strategic framework and the SDG Agenda 2030. Marcella, over to you. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed, Beth. And I'd like to join your warm, welcoming remarks for this very, indeed very, very important initiative. Which is out there now, from today, for the whole world to benefit from. And indeed, I think it's a very, very important contribution. It's a global public good. And it's an important contribution to develop capacities worldwide. Six languages, all of our UN official languages. And some of the courses have actually been translating into a couple of other non-official languages too. We are living, as Beth said, this is, we're living in unprecedented times. I think the COVID pandemic has made us think a little bit in different ways of what really is important and what really matters. And we believe in the power of capacity development for building resilience. And resilience is what is needed in a world that is hit so badly by a pandemic as we're seeing today. And we also see, especially as we are in seclusion, some of us are still in lockdown, we're not going out. But I think that we appreciate even more the power of collaboration, the power of working together, the power of coming together and find mutual grounds and find solutions and contribute them to the world. And this is indeed what we're doing right now with the Academy, with capacity development reinforcement in all of our member countries, bringing together the different partners. And indeed, this initiative has the power of the thinking and the contribution of over 200 partners throughout the world. And they're partners of different kinds. They include, of course, governments, our main partners as a UN organization. But also we've brought together the non-state actors, including private sector, including civil society, including farmers organizations, intergovernmental and regional organizations. Many UN agencies have also participated in this effort. And here you see how by coming together, by understanding their specific needs, by tailoring each one of these courses, and we have more than 350 of them available, free of charge. But listening to all of our different, the needs of our different constituents, we are able to produce these courses that go directly to respond to a very specific capacity development need. So I joined Beth in feeling the pride today. And I'd like to also congratulate all of the team who's working very, very hard in reaching out to all of you, to all of our partners, to all of our people in different parts of the world. Because indeed this is a very important accomplishment and it comes at a very important moment when many of us are still in lockdown and hopefully we can nudge people to use the lockdown opportunity which is ongoing in many countries to make even more use of these e-learning resources which they can do within the warmth and the protection of their own homes. So for us, of course, I'm the director of the partnerships division and so I really believe in partnerships. Partnerships are achieved by coming together, by listening to each other, and by sharing, sharing innovations, sharing design. In this particular case, development and delivery of competency-based capacity development interventions. In the overall objective of our economy that we're happily and proudly launching today is to strengthen human capital. And this is done through the transfer, through exchange of knowledge, skills, competencies. And our objective is to generate competent professionals who are able, not only through their knowledge, but also through their skills to be able to come up with innovative responses to challenges, even to global challenges like the one that we are living right now as we speak. The FAO e-learning academy promotes sustainability, human rights and inclusiveness and it ensures that the new and hopefully valuable competencies that it helps to promote are embedded in local institutions and that they're tailored to country-specific needs. They, all of these courses come after a very long process of listening to specific needs and the needs come from the country level or local level. So these are direct responses. So they listen, they respond to country-specific needs while enabling and empowering our FAO members to be better equipped to be able to go ahead in terms of looking in new ways at the global challenges that we are confronted. As Beth was saying, this is a massive exercise. Today, we're happy to say that we have more than 600,000 users around the world. All of the courses are developed together with all of the different FAO technical divisions. They cut across all of our strategic programs and they cover a number of thematic areas including biodiversity, climate-smart agriculture, sustainable food systems and nutrition, food safety, food losses and waste, child labor, responsible governance to land tenure and many, many, many others. And therefore, they're fully aligned with agenda 2030. They provide a learning opportunity under all of the different areas of FAO's mandate. We have, as I said before, this is a joint effort. This is a joint effort with universities, academic and research institutions with a number of the different partners that Beth already mentioned and to whom we're very, very grateful. Some of our partners have been very generous in ensuring that this initiative has the funding necessary and all of our other also partners have been very generous in also sharing their learning needs and their knowledge and their methodologies and their issues so that this joint effort is going to have a really important impact. The FAO eLearning Academy has also created, together with universities and academic work networks, a number of university masters and postgraduate degree programs based on the eLearning courses. So this is why today, as we speak, we are able to influence the learning of students around the world through these programs in terms of food security, in terms of good nutrition and many other areas of FAO's mandate. So the FAO eLearning Academy is the official certifying body of FAO and it is adopting, as Beth said, the digital badges certification system which we believe is a very important and necessary innovation for the impact of this academy. And we're also sure that this is going to help people to progress talents within the organization but also to increase their employment opportunities. And we know that especially now with the massive unemployment that we're seeing, unfortunately, due to the pandemic, this is more relevant and more important than ever. Their certification is granted by FAO by passing the final scenario-based performance evaluation and now associated to the eLearning courses. So it is with really great joy and pride that I joined this effort of the launch today of the eLearning Academy and it is my pleasure to give the floor now to Cristina Petraki. Cristina, you have the floor. Thank you. Thank you very much, Marcella, and also thank you, Mrs. Bechdel, for the excellent introductory remarks. I would like now to just talk to you a little bit about the academy and what we do. First of all, to talk a little bit about the various challenges humanity is confronted with. As you know, food insecurity remains one of the main challenges with a population either growing. In fact, it is one of the main challenges to be able to produce not only enough, but the right quality also of food, respecting the various habits and preferences. In addition, as you know, food losses and waste are also another challenge to be able to have food systems which are sustainable, which are performance, which are integrated, which allow to reduce the losses throughout the food value chains, but also food systems which have as a priority the nutritional status and the health and nutritional status of citizens. This is what we would really basically aim at. Also climate changes are also, as you know, challenges, natural disaster, extreme weather events, but also the governance of tenure and management of natural resources, gender inequalities and discrimination, child labor, youth unemployment, human and animal diseases such as COVID. So all of these are the various challenges to which humanity is confronted with. And the idea is through the FLE Learning Academy is to try to, first of all, support all the SDG framework, the Sustainable Development Goal Framework and especially SDG for universal education for anyone, anytime, anywhere, for free as a global public good with really the idea to transfer skills and competences in order to have professionals which are competent, able and capable to face all the challenges, formulate the appropriate policies, take the right interventions and strategies. So far we have reached 600,000 users throughout the world. The platform is now multilingual, as was mentioned before. And I have to mention that this is really the result of a collaborative effort because this has been possible thanks to the collaboration of over 200 partners worldwide. And actually the various thematic areas that are covered are the ones that were mentioned before. So of course we have courses on the Sustainable Development Goals, on gender discrimination, climate change, sustainable food systems, but also on trade markets investments. We have others on food safety, on responsible investment in agriculture, on agricultural risk management, migration. So the thematic areas are all the thematic areas that are needed, in which competences are needed today. So just a few words about our partners. We work with four types of organizations. So we have been working with a number of UN and development agencies, as was mentioned before. All of these agencies are basically using the FAE learning courses to develop the capacities of their staff or in their capacity development interventions. So we also have International Federation of Red Cross, UNICEF, UNITAR. The EU is using the FAE learning courses in their EU Deaf Co-Academy and in fact we will have later the testimonial from the EU. We also work with universities and academic institutions where we create master's degrees and postgraduate degrees in which basically which integrates the FAE learning courses. And so we have been doing this with one of our valuable partners, the Open University of Catalonia, and we will have their testimonial later on. We also work with UNIMAT, which is a big network of 116 universities around the Mediterranean region. So we will also have their testimonial. We work with also with NGOs and CSOs and now we are noticing a lot of interest from private sectors, especially on thematic areas such as sustainable food systems, food safety, but also they're very interested in compliance to the SDGs and to the SDG framework. So as I mentioned, we have reached so far 600,000 users and learners throughout the world and this is just to give you an idea about the geographic distribution. What is very interesting is to also see, basically, that 25% of learners are from NGOs, 20% are university professors and students that use our resources. But very, very important information is 15% of the courses are being used, 15% of our audience is government. So basically, governments are using our courses to better steer their policies and their strategies at national level and this is a very important information. Just to give you a little bit more details about how we work. So self-based e-learning courses are just one of the eight methodologies that we use. We use different pedagogical models. So as I was mentioning, formal university degrees and masters are also another modality. We also have learning programs which are fully mobile, mobile responsive and mobile compatible when we have a target audience which is in the remote areas and who do not have access maybe to computers. We also support a number of face-to-face interventions with partners and technical divisions. We also deliver certified online tutored courses. We also have, we also develop MOOCs which are massive open online courses. So we also deliver this as a methodology. We also do certified blended learning programs where we combine different methodologies. So we add the Wikis, we add blogs, we have country dimensions, regional dimensions. So we do certified blended learning programs for regions, for at national level, etc. And we also do online technical webinars. We are doing a number of them with some of our partners. So I mentioned before, as you know, FL is custodian of 21 of the SDG indicators. And for these indicators, we also have developed specific courses to support countries in the collection, analysis, interpretation and reporting of these SDG indicators for which FL is custodian. And these are the indicators. These also, these are all the SDG indicators. And so very, very quickly, we are using latest adult learning theories. And our model is basically, is based on the ADDIE model. I'm not going to go into the details, but what I just wanted to mention is what was said also by Marcella. For every single learning activity, for every single learning intervention, or for every single course, we do a collaborative, and we do a collaborative learning needs assessment with a number of partners, field practitioners, target audiences that are involved to participate in the design of the learning intervention. So we always use a participatory approach and we always use a learner-centered and job-oriented approach to design our interventions. In fact, we go very much into the details of who the target audience is. What are the professional profiles that we are targeting? What are the specific competences that we want to design? What are the roles and responsibilities of our target groups? What are their job tasks? And then for each job task, we try to extract the competences, the skills, the knowledge they need to acquire. So everything we do is really target audience-based, competency-based, but also we look at the main professional profiles that are required. So of course, when you change thematic areas, the target audiences change completely. So for example, for SDG indicators related to fisheries, the target audiences were, for example, national fisheries administration officer or small-small-scale fishing community member organizations, etc. So it changes based on the different intervention. But what I wanted to mention is that our methodology is still very consistent and the same and looks into the target audiences, their needs, their activities, and then the competences that need to be developed. To then design the curriculum, which are a combination of concepts, principles, procedures, attitude, that we also consider interpersonal skills and attitudes as part of the curriculum. And then we apply different learning strategies based on the different type of content. So of course, you're not going to use the same learning strategy if you are teaching a procedure and if you're teaching a principle, you need to use a completely different learning strategy. So there is all this analysis, which is done by our very talented instructional designers. And very quickly, I just also wanted to mention that some of our blended learning programs were conducted, for example, for the entire Association of Southeast Asian Nations. For example, for Asian, we have done a number of learning programs for Komesa, for SILVs, for ECOWAS, and every time we designed the intervention together with our partners, with the countries and with the target audiences. So this is a huge effort and investment in well targeting the interventions and the courses. This is examples of our platform. I'm not going to go into the details, but this is just to tell you that very often we also foresee post workshops and post courses, online mentoring phases, where basically participants have the possibility to still interact with the future and with the other participants to help face the challenges they have in their country. And so as I was mentioning, we also use mobile tools and video-based learning, etc. Now I'd like to conclude with talking to you a little bit about the certification that was mentioned before. So we have become the FAE Learning Academy now in 2020 because we have introduced the online digital badge certification system. This is a worldwide system that is being used a lot. It allows to better match the competences of professionals to the learning, basically to the employment opportunities. So it's a way to design your own professional profile by accumulating these badges. Each badge certifies a number of competences acquired and they are evidence-based. So I will be explaining this a little bit just to let you know that, for example, private sector is using digital badges. For example, IBM, Dell, Oracle, HP, all of these big companies require their stuff to have specific badges on specific competences. So this is really a highly in demand in private sector. But also UN has started, for example, UNICEF has developed a series of badges. Also big NGO, humanitarian NGOs, they are using these badges to certify the competences of their stuff. And so just to let you know a little bit more, so once you earn these badges, they can follow you everywhere in your e-portfolio, in your CV, in your LinkedIn, it really becomes part of your professional profile. And they are very flexible and they can be accumulated, basically. So just a little bit more information about how it works. The badge, yes, is a graphical element, but behind it is there is a database-driven system with the metadata related to the badge. So the badge certifies, it is an authentication data system where the badge certifies the acquisition of specific competences. You have, of course, in the metadata name, the course title, but also the competences acquired. And how can we do this? Because after you do the course, we have designed final scenario-based tests. So these are competency-based tests. So basically the questions that are asked in the test are not, do you remember what was mentioned in the course? But we try to design a scenario with challenges, with a certain situation, and then you are asked, okay, in this situation, what is it that you actually have to do? So there, if you pass the test, you actually demonstrate that you have acquired specific competences. And so these are the badges that we have been developing for the FAOE Learning Academy courses. They cover a range of thematic areas that are the ones that were mentioned before. Here I'd like to mention, really, the very talented graphical artist, which is Benedetta Vange, that I thank very much for all of these. These are the ones that we have developed for the SDG indicators that I mentioned before. And I would like to conclude by telling you about the three publications that the FAOE Learning Academy has. So one is about the achievements of 2019. The other one is on our pedagogical models and learning solutions. So this is the second one. And the third one describes really all the different methodologies that it documents exactly the methodologies that we are using. And we are now about to release the second edition. So from my side, that's it. I would like to thank you very much for the attention. And now I would like to give the floor to our partners to hear. So as you know, the FAOE Learning courses have also been used at national level to basically support countries in policy reform and policy formulation processes. And in that, I would like to give the floor to my colleague Francesca Romano from FAOE that will give us, share with us her experiences at national level in policy reform. Francesca, the floor is yours. You have three to five minutes. Thank you. Thank you very much, Christina. And good morning, good afternoon, good evening to so many people connected today. Christina gave me quite a challenge task because she asked me to explain how an e-learning or a learning program can actually bring a concrete impact and result at country level, in particular with regard to policies and legal changes. But first of all, let me introduce myself. My name is Francesca Romano and part of the LEN tenure team in FAOE. And my team works in relation to looking into how we can make tenure rights more secure for people. And we work in the framework of the so-called voluntary guidelines on the responsible governance of tenure. This is a global instrument adopted by the CFS in 2012. Now, this is a high-level tool that when adopted, though is very powerful, is very difficult to translate in actions by people in the ground and in particular by government. But this is actually possible. And it's possible because we were able to transform a high-level document with a language that was designed for policymakers, if you want, to technical guides and then to e-learning and then to learning programs that we delivered at country level. There are now 10 e-learning associated to the voluntary guidelines available in multiple languages, including Arabic. And we have three and very soon four learning program associated to the voluntary guidelines. A general one, one on gender, one on responsible investment and very soon one on pastoralism. Now, on the ground, what happened? Let me give you two examples. One from Africa, from Sierra Leone, an extremely poor country, very little resources, a country that faced first a civil war and then Ebola. And now, unfortunately, COVID as everybody knows. With very limited human resources. Through the use of the e-learning and in particular the learning program on gender and on investment, we have been able to create a very strong and cohesive group of capacitated people. I would like to call them key change agents. That since the past four to five years are now extremely engaged in the discussion of legal and policy reform in the country. And in particular, with regard to land investment, which is a core aspect of the voluntary guidelines because what we define very often as land grabbing but more generally as non-responsible land-based investment are a concern to many, in particular to the most vulnerable people. Now, in Sierra Leone, the learning program that we delivered actually together, bringing together government representative of Sierra Leone and Liberia, we were able actually to together with government representative to review what we define as the investment approval process. What is that? Is how a country attracts, implement, and monitor responsible investment. The outcome of this process, which has been quite a long one. I mean, at least we have been working for three years and the process is still working, is going on, sorry. It's a revised process, which is aligned to best practices and it's fully owned by the country. And this is a great result, which has also led now to the discussion on a new customary land bill, which again, for those who are familiar with land tenure, you can imagine how important is protecting customary land rights. The, let's say the side effect, if you want, of this learning program to me at least, is also the capacities of creating a shift in the way people, if you want, behave and interact. Because we bring together people from different constituencies as what we call a multi-stakeholder approach. And again, the learning program built around the e-learning that Christina has so well described was absolutely instrumental and crucial. It's very difficult to create a direct link between a tool and the impact. But I can actually say very loud and strong that the role that e-learning and the learning program and my colleagues, of course, have played in all that is evident. And the same thing applies to Mongolia. So a completely different setting. Again, we're talking about a country where in this case, the pastoralist communities is the one that FAO was trying to support and their rights and their access to resources to learn for pastoralist activities. There, the impact that we brought through the learning programs and the e-learning was the possibilities of unblocking a process that was stuck for several years on the discussion of the pastoral and law, which is crucial and key for the pastoralist community. Now, after so many years, unfortunately, the law has not been adopted yet. And these, of course, tell us always that there is a need for a number of different elements to come together. So capacity development is one of them. Political will is another, of course, and many others. But certainly, I can say that the possibilities of opening a discussion that was locked with the government around a crucial aspect for the daily life of millions of people in Mongolia is certainly, in my view, at least a concrete outcome of the work that we did through the e-learning and the learning program, in this case, in particular for the pastoralist communities. So I hope that these two elements can actually, I mean, show how powerful, if accompanied by other mechanisms, an e-learning and a learning program can be at a country level. And I thank you very much for listening to my presentation. I hope I made it on time, Christina. Yes, yes, excellent. The timing and the quality. Thank you very much. I would like to give the floor to my colleague, Michael Riggs, who will be talking to us a little bit about how we have supported the responsible investment programs in agriculture. So Michael, the floor is yours. You have three to five minutes. Great, Christina. Hello to everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Wherever you are. As Christina said, my name is Michael. Michael Riggs, I work in the team for responsible agricultural investment, or the RYE team, as it's known internally, in the partnerships division. And I wanted maybe to go back a bit and point out to the value of us in working with the e-learning academy and the learning team that's behind it, because it allows us, we're a relatively small team, to build on the experiences in a learning sense, the experiences of other units within FAO, but also of this great constellation of partners that Christina talked about outside of FAO, to develop not only our technical content, but also the pedagogy and learning methods behind it. So that basically we can take a team like mine with technical experts and have the opportunity to also have excellent top quality learning programs put together. And this enables us to expand our reach once things are content is published online in the academy, which we're hearing about today. It enables us to expand our reach way beyond what we would normally be able to do in our team's own direct work on field projects or normative work. And if you look in the e-learning academy now, you'll find that there are several recently published courses on responsible investments in agriculture and food systems. It's a collection that's new and also growing, coming also from our team, but also many other sources both inside and outside FAO, and also in various language versions. And the content that you'll see there if you take a look online is sort of the learning cornerstone of my team's work in learning programs. So we constantly go back to this content ourselves to use it in customized programs that are delivered at the country level, both online and face-to-face settings. And this content provides, it's learning, but more than just learning it, it helps people understand better about some of the top issues that they're working on and it really gives them the confidence to go forward and seek change in their own settings. So I'd like to highlight a recent experience we're currently working for about a year and a half now with policy makers in four of these Senegal river basin countries. These are individuals who come from Guinea, from Mali, Mauritania and Senegal. And these policy makers are aware of the challenges in managing, but also increasing, investments in the agricultural sector. We need more investments to achieve the SDGs to ensure food security, but not any old investment will do. It's not simply a matter of looking through a standardized investment approval process. One of the issues is tenure, which my colleague Francesca just spoke about, but in the context of responsible investment, there are many more issues. There are issues of environmental nature, there are social issues, issues of governance, issues of grievance and so on. And the framework for responsible investment enables people to get a bigger picture and look at what's really important here. So through this training, using the content that you can find in the E-Learning Academy, what have we achieved? We've taken these group of policy makers who've gotten together twice now over the last year and a half and enabled them to innovate in their responses to challenges in their country. They've created national action plans that include new programs. So actually not just an idea, but going beyond the idea and step-by-step programs of how they are working within their own job context to create more inclusive policymaking decisions around investment. Or another thing that's been identified by a different country is how to revise incentive schemes and also incubators to support investments by young, angry entrepreneurs. And another area is to look at more efficient but also inclusive investment approval processes. So not just including the government or not just including the government and private sector, but also looking at the communities that are being impacted by these investments to ensure that the positive results of the investments is maximized. So, and we could go on more. There's a lot more detail about what's being learned here and what these countries are accomplishing through this learning program, but I don't have time to explain all of this now. In addition, though, what we get back from this work with the Academy's learning is the learning model that we're using and it's worked so well in the SRB countries. We can replicate in the near future in other countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone or Laos in Asia. So not to go on too much longer. I just want to point out that we have learned a lot from this. We have a lot of strategy around the learning programs for Rai and thanks to the e-learning Academy. Now you can access the content that we're creating. And if anybody would like to learn more about the work that we actually do in our particular setting, for those inside FAO, there will be a capacity development seminar on this later in the year that you can learn from and then I'll put a link in the chat box for everybody else, both inside and outside FAO. So you can follow up more about these learning programs and what we're doing in the specific context of responsible investment. So thank you for your time and Christina, back to you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Michael. I will thank you very much for your testimonial. I would like to now give the floor to my colleague, Bernd Seyfert, with whom we have been working on child labor. And I would like to ask him to share with us his experience with all the work that we have been doing together around the child labor and all the learning program around it. Bernd, the floor is yours. You have three to five minutes. Thank you. Thank you very much, Christina. I'm very happy to be here today and talk about our rich and very positive experience in working together with the eLearning team and FAO. We have some years ago started to look into the development of eLearning on the topic of ending child labor in agriculture. And we started off with a curriculum development workshop and we invited a very wide range of agricultural stakeholders from around the world facilitated by Christina's team. We looked into what are the different job profiles to start with, who are we targeting actually. And out of this came a very rich curriculum and we have for a few years now already 10 different courses on ending child labor in agriculture where we have an introduction, where we look into how do we engage different stakeholders, what data and knowledge exists and how can we generate it. What kind of competencies are needed to influence national policies and to achieve policy coherence. How to address child labor in the formulation of agricultural programs and there are very many different types of these programs. Monitoring and evaluation and also impact assessment of agricultural initiatives on child labor. So particularly interesting for those involved in M&E communicating effectively on child labor and agriculture building capacity, providing advocacy to address child labor and agriculture. It's another course. Then also, of course, we have one of the courses focusing on business strategies and public private partnerships. Pasty sites management and child labor prevention is very popular and a very popular course and a wide range of those actors in agriculture dealing with pasty sites are very interested in this course. Then we have one on use employment and reducing child labor and agriculture. There's actually linkage between use employment and child labor that age group 15, 17 could be in hazardous work, but if we change the conditions of their work we can change the child labor situation into one of use employment. So these are the different courses each have a number of lessons together if you want to take it all it's about 20 hours. So it's very long, but since it is broken down in different courses most of our users over the years have opted to do the introduction part and then a specialization subject that is aligned with their specific job or interest. So this was a very, very good experience. We work very close also with the ITC ILO training center in Turin for example doing blended learning usually every year where as a precondition to coming to Turin participants are expected to take certain number of these courses. The private sector has very well taken it up. Some are using two of these courses for the supply chain actors in global supply chains in the beverage sector for example the Rotterdam Convention dealing with pasty sites has a lot used this course and found it highly valuable that they also funded to translate it into further languages like Portuguese or Russian which we otherwise wouldn't have had the funding for. All courses are available in English French and Spanish but only some in additional languages. Then of course ministries of agriculture are using it a lot. We have for example in Cambodia had the request of the Department of Fisheries part of the larger ministry of agriculture there the request of helping them to set up a certification system for their colleagues. So once they take the course to have a certificate now finally I can contact them and say now it is available. It was for in our case launched last week of the World Day Against Child Labor even our FAO Director-General was referring to this that now we have all these courses available both in a new format but even more attractive I should say how it is visually presented but now available with this certification system by our badges. So colleagues not only in Cambodia but also other ministries who had asked us precisely this where can we have certificates if we ask our colleagues and our staff to do it. Some do this voluntary and other institutions that actually make it compulsory to take this course. Yeah that is obviously now a great achievement for us as well. So we've used it in so many different contexts farmer organizations members of the Global Alliance 8.7 that deals with ending all child labor which is the SDG target 8.7 So yes I just must congratulate again the eLearning team at FAO for years of excellent collaboration it was hard work to develop some of the content that didn't exist anywhere before. So we really had to develop that on the way in the exchange with stakeholders and it is greatly used and we get a lot of positive feedback. It's a joint FAO ILO eLearning course but targeting in particular agricultural stakeholders specific groups of jobs but it's also of interest to the wider to a much wider audience interested in the topic. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. In fact also many private sectors such as Coca-Cola and others are very interested in being in showing the world that they are for example child labor free in their approaches and in their value chains. So these type of courses are also demonstrating to have a great interest also for private sector. I'd like now to give the floor to my colleague Nicole Franz that will briefly tell us about share with us her experiences related to small scale fisheries and to the SDG indicators related to fisheries. So Nicole the floor is yours. You have three to five minutes. Thank you very much Christina and hello to everybody. It's very exciting to be here and thanks a lot for having the opportunity to talk to you. I am working in the fisheries and aquaculture department of FAO and I work mostly on small scale fisheries. And as you may know FAO is what is called custodian agency for some of the SDG indicators. And one of I think the first e-learning in support of the SDG indicators that FAO produced was actually for indicator 14B1 which is in support of securing sustainable small scale fisheries. So this training, this e-learning was released in 2017 and it's available in the six official languages. We have also adopted a participatory development approach for the development of this training. And the first time we really used it was in an international expert workshop that took place in 2017 where we had participants from 15 different countries attending from all parts of the world, Spain, Africa, Latin America, the Pacific, Asia and not only were they coming from 15 different countries but they were also representing different type of stakeholders. So we had representatives from government, we had representatives from regional organizations but we also had representatives from actually small scale fishery organizations. Both those that are actually spending their days in and about out fishing but also from a women organization those that are involved in terms of processing the fish afterwards. And what we did was to actually in that workshop on SDG 14B we divided the participants into small groups, mixed groups with different participants from government from these regional organizations from the small scale fishery actor organizations and we asked them to look at different modules of these different units of the training and to go through it to basically do that that learning together and then to present to the others in the room what they have learned. And that was a really very nice interactive experience also because the different participants were coming in and looking at their training with a different perspective and they all in the end came back to us and said that they found it very useful and they actually in this training in 2017 came back to us with some comments with some suggestions on how to further improve the training and we took that on board and we refined those units a little bit more and we also actually did interviews with the participants which now are incorporated in this final version so those who were the first to kind of pilot it are now actually part of the training which I think is also quite nice. So this is a really useful training to learn about the methodology for reporting on the SDGs and Marcelo mentioned it at the beginning it's part of our role as FAO to develop the capacities of our partners and we see these trainings, this e-learning as really a tool to enable a better reporting, better awareness about the methods on how to report on the SDGs. We have used this training also, this e-learning in another regional workshop that took place in 2019 in the Pacific. Again we brought together different stakeholders from the fisheries administrations, from the regional organizations relevant for the Pacific and from small-scale fisher organizations and this time we also used again the e-learning because it's an online tool, you can do it individually at home that's kind of how it's supposed to be used but we thought also going over it as a group and see how we can use it as a tool even in other settings is quite useful and in that case we actually asked all participants to do the whole training so in a workshop of three days we broke down the learning, the different units and we tied them to the workshop agenda so we would start the session with people looking first at the e-learning or in other cases we would first have a working session in the workshop and then have our participants go through the e-learning so that all of them went over that together and the purpose here was to really have them give them a role as a catalyst because then they had done the training they had experienced it we had clarified some questions and their task was to go back and share it then with others and that's actually also my last point just very briefly also another e-learning that we are finalizing is about the methodology for better data collection for small-scale fisheries and it's not released yet but stay tuned for it it should come out either end of this year or early next year thank you very much and sorry for going over time excellent thank you very much Nicole now we're changing completely the type of testimonials and I would like to give the to hear we would like to now hear the experiences of our university and academia partners so I have invited Marcello Scalisi from UNIMED which is the network of universities around the Mediterranean area so Marcello the floor is yours you have three to five minutes to talk about our collaboration thank you very much Cristina it's a pleasure to be here with you this week we have this UNIMED week in Brussels that is the fifth edition that we are now organizing online and we have also invited our members to attend your event including this event as a sort of external webinar of the UNIMED week and I saw a lot of our colleagues coming from our network as you said UNIMED is a network of universities around the Mediterranean region we have 130 universities from 23 countries in our network both sides of European and southern Mediterranean side obviously this initiative is very important for us as you know UNIMED and the FAO have an agreement to sign it signed last year at the beginning of this adventure for us like a small organization like UNIMED to work and to cooperate with FAO we were thinking how to push FAO to be active and we were astonished after because we discovered that you are too so active and I don't want to say only the evening academy platform but all the colleagues and we are very proud to be with you we are promoting your initiative we are collecting several very good feedback from our members in particular we have two groups of our members that are very interested about what you are doing the first one is the sub network because we have several sub networks in our network the first one is on e-learning and open educational resources and we promoted and consulted our colleagues trying to involve them in the learning academy FAO academy and the other one is the sub network on food and water that is obviously a definition interest in what you are doing and they have to say that we found a very important interest from both sides of mediterranean not only southern mediterranean but also the european universities and this is quite interesting for us and I hope that in the future we will be able to do something more for instance why not to include some of your courses in the curricula of our universities and why not to have also some inter university cooperation through your activity and so the idea for us is to invite our members to open the door to institutional collaboration and not only to remain in their own academia dimension and partnership and I think that through the cooperation with you we could test this opportunity and in some way also we could offer to our community a very good service thanks christina thank you thank you very much marcello now we have been also designing a number of masters degrees university masters degrees and specializations with the open university of catalonia and I would like to give the floor with the to Javier Medina who has been my counterpart and with whom we have designed the number of programs to just share with us his experience Javier the floor is yours you have three to five minutes thank you thank you very much christina the warrior I'll try to be short I know we are almost on the table so well first of all I have to say thank you and that we are proud very proud of our collaboration after 11 years we start our collaboration in 2009 with a particular masters master's degree in english on food society and international food governance and after that with the evolution of this master's degree it was a second one on food security and international food governance after that we prepared together with different learning materials from the FAO academy to post-graduate programs on different subjects around food security this case arrived to food and on the other hand food security and advocacy and action and another three different university certificates all around always around food security and always using the wonderful learning materials from made by my FAO so that part was in english but we also used we're still using your materials in spanish in our master's degree in nutrition and health so we are very happy to our collaboration that side because your materials all your educational preparation is wonderful and very useful from our perspective finally I can particularly remember a couple of international projects training particularly some FAO people working in different different parts of the world one of them was a particularly interesting one training some people mainly working for FAO in the south eastern Europe in different countries from Albania to Azerbaijan and another one particularly interesting in specifically for in Ethiopia so after that unfortunately our master's degree in food security and international food governance and last years after after 10 years of beautiful collaboration but we are proud to say also that we are thinking about new possibilities of new collaboration in in a short future so thank you very much Christina and that's all from Barcelona thank you thank you thank you very much Javier now I'm giving the floor to Sara Roversi who is the founder of Future Food Institute with the Future Food Institute we have done many many very interesting interventions we have done last year a hackathon an international hackathon on the sustainable development goals this year we have done a huge digital 24-hour global marathon on sustainability and we also are designing and developing joint international boot camps so Sara Roversi the floor is yours you have three to five minutes thank you where is she Sara Sara could you unmute yourself please you have to unmute yourself because the contact is not very stable so I was also with the co-phone I don't think it's gonna work but anyway so yes thank you so much for having us with you today thank you so much Christina and it's a pleasure to be with the FAO family so since we started our collaboration actually we really tried to create very unconventional experience of learning our program we started last year our program we're really focused on creating intergenerational pathway really to combine people that come from different backgrounds but also coming from different ages working a lot with young innovators start-uppers students but also policy makers and decision makers so together we organized the boot camps last year but also hackathons now this year a digital boot camp and a 24-hour marathon combining together 100 speakers and trying to create the longest lesson on feeding the planet on Earth Day so together with FAO we really try to combine all the incredible value that the learning platform is offering to everyone everywhere accessible in each kind of part of the world but also combining this with very experiential trainings on the ground this summer we're about to launch our first digital boot camp that is going to start at the beginning of July but from September we're going to start again also our physical boot camp let's hope and we actually targeted 10 different countries with four main topics so training change makers on how we can tackle the challenges that we are facing being very focused on those four chapters so designing innovation for resilient communities that are living on the oceans on the coastal then talking about rural areas and farmers then we're talking about citizens and smart cities in the cities of the future that needs to be able to manage all the issues related to food access to food the food waste but say this is going to be for sure something really connected to the fourth topic that is connected to the kitchen and actually today is the world day of sustainable gastronomy so I think that this is truly really connected actually to this topic and so the fourth topic is training innovators on designing climate smart kitchen experience and so this is how we work with FAO really trying to test new ways of creating the innovation pathway bringing innovators together from all around the world thank you thank you very much Sara I have to mention that we're the the global 24 hour marathon in the 24 hours we managed to gather 100,000 people about to listen about sustainability so that was actually quite an achievement to be able to gather 100,000 people from all over the world to listen and to hear about the experiences related to sustainability I would like now to give the floor to our partner Danone so we have worked also with Danone the private company so we have worked with many private companies where the courses were incorporated in their learning platform for their staff but also in their processes to change their processes so I would like to give the floor to Alice Durand-Reville from Danone because we have also worked with them so Alice the floor is yours you have three to five minutes thank you thank you so much Christina can you hear me well wonderful so it's absolutely great to be here today and hear about all those exciting news and the exciting perspective as you mentioned we were one of the private companies that are really very interested from the beginning on these early learning platforms and I just wanted to share a little what is the private sector interest to enter those lessons and these processes just a very general statement to start with which is that we really think that access to knowledge and capacity building are the backbone of every progress everywhere it sounds a little general but in those very difficult times that we all we all go through it's important also to remind how knowledge is important it's the key solidarity to independence to adaptation to resilience and fulfillment and it's also the only way that we will find collectively to tackle the pressing challenge of climate change and biodiversity loss it's really a moment where we all must come together and align on knowledge and science so it's super important Danone just a few words to introduce Danone Danone is a food food company that is serving 800 million consumers worldwide and in 120 countries we are mostly our businesses mostly in dairy and plant-based protein which means that we are really very connected to agriculture and agricultural processes but Danone is also the biggest proposed driven company is a strange and new concept it is also called entreprise a mission in France and public benefit cooperation in the U.S. why is it important because it means that all our employees worldwide are 100,000 employees are really motivated and join us and join Danone because of this kind of mission we have given ourselves which is one planet one health and really working as much to deliver profit but also to deliver this mission which is to really bring benefit to the planet and to the people and all the way we we do our job is also to bring this double profit to everyone but it's very difficult to feel empowered if you don't understand what you're talking about it's very difficult to get engaged and to to go in a company if you don't understand what your concrete contribution to very complex topics can be it's very difficult to understand and act on very very complex concepts like sustainable food systems or SDGs so if you don't access the knowledge you need in the language which is yours adapted to your geography adapted to your level of education you cannot act and then you cannot as a citizen but also as a Danone employee to embark our employees in this very long journey toward sustainable food systems we needed a strong scientific global partner to develop more accessible knowledge for all we needed to turn very complex concepts into practical knowledge and knowledge into actions this is why Danone was so happy and myself also so happy and proud to partner with FAO and benefit from the early stages of the e-learning academy in 2019 Danone MPU years spent 27 hours in average on training and a large part of these trainings are e-learnings we integrated some of the FAO models into Danone's online training platform and encouraged all our employees to register and to attend to the models we appreciated the great diversity of approaches and I will come back on this in a minute which is it's true that there was a lot of different topics some which were quite familiar to us and some that are most difficult for us to approach like child labor so what was really interesting for us also is not only to have some topics that are directly linked to business but also so very important modules that were linked to our core values so this was very helpful we also appreciated the great diversity of formats because all our employees cannot take two or three or four hours in one program so there are some programs that were half an hour and others that were two hours and others that were four hours and this was really important because there was a very big range of knowledge level from very broad concepts to very technical trainings and this was also something very important for us today we're really happy to welcome this new format of the academy we especially welcome with a lot of appreciating appreciation the much better user experience the really improvement in the user experience I saw that your trainings were available also on the format on cell phones on different digital platforms and this will be really much easier for us and our employees to to connect with I also saw that and it was very much said before me there's a lot of different formats from MOOCs to online courses to hackathons and this is also something that is very suitable to our very flexible and adaptable employees and we also welcome with very much appreciate the digital badges or e-certificate it is true that when our employees go on trainings they're always appreciate to have to be able to put them in the career path or have something that will really deliver value and be transmissible to their the company so this is also a very very good evolution from the platform before so we welcome and we will of course be be very happy to go on cooperating with this platform especially on courses like sustainable food systems which are very very important for us but also regenerative agriculture and also sustainable agriculture practices so thank you very much and we really look for working with you on longer terms thank you thank you thank you very much Alice and I would like now to give the floor to Alejandra Rivas who works with the European Union Death Co Academy we are working with the academy we actually share with them many of our courses and we also share with them our international webinars so Alejandra the floor is yours you have three to five minutes thank you thank you Cristina and thank you everyone I wonder if you see my screen because now I'm sharing the screen yes so yes actually here you see the Death Co Academy we are from the European Commission and this is a public learning platform openly accord the entire development community it provides free access to set of e-learning course documentation and podcasts and developed by the European Commission DG Death Co and in close cooperation with our partners specifically the FAO with whom we have an excellent collaboration and most of the e-learning courses come from the FAO e-learning academy examples like the SDGs indicators courses introduction to climate smart agriculture so we actually share the same approach which is the approach to learning and offer free and open self-paced online learning resources to all citizens so as the Death Co Academy is a platform for the development community we promote I will go to topics we promote topics such as agriculture food security nutrition fragility and this is where we have so within these topics is where we have integrated the resources the e-learning courses coming from the FAO as you have you can see here the list is quite big so I can say that we have about 60 80 e-learning courses coming from you from the FAO e-learning academy that we host on the Death Co Academy and also our platform is multilingual so we have courses in English, French, Spanish and even in Portuguese so with this I can say that we rely on the FAO as our partner because you are committed to promote it online learning and you understand the value of your knowledge and you're making sure that no one is left behind so but our close collaboration is not only about e-learning courses I mentioned webinars so I will come here to our learning methods from long time already the European Commission and the FAO have been working together in the production of a series of webinars and we have grouped them under the topic fragility for example in this case so you can see that there are webinars produced from 2017 then 18, 19 and so on the list is also quite big as you can see here all of these resources in the on the Death Co Academy they are free of charge the users can the users they only need to click on one of the the titles and they will they will go to the page enroll me and they will go directly to to the page to the course page of their webinar page so here we mentioned everything about the collaboration between FAO and the EC but this is not only about hosting e-learning courses or hosting the webinars coming from the FAO we also collaborate or let's say that we we support the FAO with promoting upcoming webinars and I say this because actually you are working right now in the production of a series of international technical webinars together with the partners your partners at Grinion and UNSCAP and we also promote and help with the promotion of the webinars by our different communication channels like the Death Co Academy newsletter and here in in the section of coming events you can see that we offer the link to your registration and also to we give the opportunity to the users to download the invitation so I will need to say thank you so much for this great collaboration we support you you support us with sharing all of these e-learning courses e-learning resources that we can offer for free to everyone so you are doing a great job thank you thank you very much Alejandra this was really excellent thank you thank you all actually I would like to just answer a few questions that I've received meanwhile during the event so many people are asking where can they find the courses so it's very easy it's e-learning.file.org it is the link I am actually asking Fabio to add the screen with the with the link so this is the link of the e-learning academy it's e-learning.file.org and many of you were asking how to see the competences related to the to the badges so after the courses you have the possibility to doing the test the tests are final scenario-based competency-based tests and if you pass the test and you have a score of over 75% you get the digital badge if you click on the badge you then can see all the metadata and all the specific competences that you have acquired so this is how it works and so I would like to before giving the floor to the head of the capacity development unit Don Ginfang I would like to thank you all very much thank you to all the participants who stayed till the end thank you to all the partners who joined us with their testimonials many many we have worked with many other partners but we selected these ones just to share their testimonials I would like to also thank those who have made these webinars possible Fabio Piccinic Aristide Bucaré and Sara Ferrante from my team all the M.T.O.E. Learning Academy team who is really about 30 very very talented instructional designers and graphic designers and I would like to give the floor to Mrs. Don Ginfang for the concluding remarks thank you all very much thank you Christina so good morning good afternoon good evening to everybody I do believe that we fully achieve the overall objective of the events today so through launching of the F.E.O.E. Learning Academy we discussed the role and the impact of the e-learning courses developed by F.E.O. in close collaboration with the numbers of internal and the external partners showcasing F.E.O.'s partnerships so with multi stakeholders and F.E.O.'s contribution to capacity development of the members and partners worldwide most importantly I believe that the event today provided us a very nice opportunity was to update the advances and the achievements made in the area of e-education e-learning and so on so that's really important for us and as just as we discussed in fact with the current situation of the COVID-19 it has necessitated a move from traditional learning to e-learning so in fact there continues to be new and novel ways for us to make the e-learning more effective in the future I mean if you compare with the traditional learning so just as mentioned by our DDD Bess our director Marcella and my colleague Christina in fact the F.E.O. e-learning academy is the the result of a very collaborative collaboration with more than 200 partners so in this sense and based on our discussion today let's strengthen and deepen our collaboration further and let's work closely even more than ever to share information to share knowledge and resources and to develop capacities to innovate more solutions approaches and technologies so as to achieve the SDGs and the 2030 agenda so last but not least let me end my closing by thanking first of all our DDD Bess and our director Marcella thank you for your time to stay with us and your continued support to our work in in particular in the work of e-learning academy development is very much appreciated and of course big banks need to go to our distinguished panelists thank you so much for your great contribution to the outcome of the event today of course we need to thank all the participants just as mentioned by Christina to thank you so much for your active participation in fact I know that many of the the participants are our partners either internal or external partners so I would like to at the end of my at the end at the end of my talk I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all so much for your great contribution and cooperation in the past years in terms of the development of FEO e-learning course and the FEO academy development thank you so much thank you bye bye thank you everybody